Week 3: Comic Strips

For this week, we had to delve into the topic of comic strips. I in particular chose to focus on Calvin and Hobbes. This title has always intrigued me but before this, I never found the time to sit down and really read some of Bill Watterson’s works. Considering the sheer amount of people I know who say Calvin and Hobbes is their favorite comic strip (a friend of mine has had a cat for 13 years named Mr. Hobbes), I was happy to finally join them.

What is interesting about comic strips is unlike  the form we typically equate with comics, comic books and graphic novels, comic strips must be accessible to all  and in small amounts. With exceptions to the rule with comics like Prince Valiant where there is a continuous ongoing story, the majority of comic strips must have a very contained story, limited to usually one line of panels or on occasion, a page. They tell their gag or their often humorous message and that is it for that story.

Calvin and Hobbes I found very interesting. It definitely played into the basic comic strip formula of small stories on a daily basis. The overall idea of the strip is its just following the adventures of Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, who he sees as a real friend. What I noticed was how many of these strips didn’t rely on that gimmick to be entertaining. While an original idea, to have a small kid talking to his plushie as if it were real, one would think that the stories would get old over time. However, Calvin and Hobbes is about more than that. It’s more of a slice of life story about this little boy’s childhood, and Hobbes just happens to be a part of that. In several strips, Hobbes isn’t even in there.

Calvin and Hobbes also showed me that comic strips didn’t need constant light hearted gags. On several occasions, it was bringing up rather large topics for a comic mostly about a kid playing pretend. One sticks out in my mind where he and Hobbes are racing in his wagon and are wondering about very complicated subject matters like fate.

Being a daily strip, the writer no doubt had to pull from a variety of sources to find inspiration. Strips like the one mentioned above could just be the writer’s commentary on such topics, a random thought that popped into his head turned into a strip. Other strips include subtle political commentary, comparing Calvin saying ‘no girls allowed’ in his tree house to full sex discrimination. Its a rather dark comparison, but it adds to the humor. Some strips I couldn’t even guess where they got the inspiration from, the ideas seeming so random, but I suppose when you need to make a strip a day, there’s no harm in it.

Week 2: "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud

Reading the book “Understanding Comics” brought to light several interesting concepts dealing with the comic media, many I had never actually thought of before. In particular, I found it intriguing how he brought up the idea that even in a single panel, there is passage of time.

Normally when thinking of comics, the time passes between panels. However the image, unlike single images of other media where the image is taken as a snapshot of an event, within comics, time can pass even in that single frame. I think I was always semi aware of this, but I didn’t even register the difference until this book pointed it out. Comics have their own flow, one thats so different from non comic illustrations and even from movies. Its like they are their own moving picture on a page.

How is this possible? Well as McCloud brings up, the inclusion of speech bubbles to an amazing job separating the events. We read it like a book where we see the flow of time through sentences. Reading draws the time out for our brains, and due to regular sentence structure, reading from left to right (or right to left as seen in manga), it allows us to follow the speech bubbles. Because of this odd delay due to the words, we have context for the art and are able to read it just as we are a sentence in any other book.

I do find it interesting that the term for enjoying a comic is to ‘read’ it, just as you would a book. Some would say comics are almost closer to illustrations or even movies but you ‘read’ neither of those. Instead you ‘look’ at a painting and you ‘watch’ a movie. Even wordless comics, such as “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan, we read them even though there are no speech bubbles.